Welcome to the weekly newsletter from The Edge Group. For each edition, we pull together our favorite content on all things media, marketing, innovation, analytics and of course, email.
If you'd like to learn more about the work we do, or discuss anything related to newsletters, content and data, please get in touch here.
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That smell of great curation in the morning
As a team of writing nerds, we could not get enough of this piece. We all learned about alliteration in middle school, but what about Tricolons and Synaesthesia? Let's not forget about Diacopes, Anadiploses, or Transferred Epithets.
Felix Jamestin put together a fantastic explanation of a number of these terms, as well as a comprehensive catalog using one of our favorite tools.
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Tricolon: The successive use of 3 parallel words or phrases.
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Fighting the Mafia with A.I.
These days, even technology-driven, crime-fighting firms steeped in academia have cool, agency-sounding names like Crime&tech.
Our favorite piece this week covering the logical and incredible possibilities of A.I. comes from The Economist. Using the data of 5,000 firms directly linked to the Mafia, an Italian data firm is working to algorithmically predict the likelihood that a firm is paying off the Mafia using payroll data, income patterns, and even demographic data.
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We paid to send you this email
A Twitter thread from Shane Parrish at Farnam Street that introduces the smart, but seemingly counter-intuitive, concept of capping your email list to maintain quality. He makes an obvious, but often-forgotten point: “We pay to send you an email”. Reminding yourself of this would hopefully change your mindset from top-line list growth, to building a healthy, engaged audience.
Note: If you find this newsletter remotely interesting, we very, very highly recommend following Farnam Street.
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The Science of Storytelling
This MarketingLand piece that covers the neuropsychology of the power of storytelling brought forth such gems as:
Oxytocin is “neurological substrate for the Golden Rule”.
Metaphor is derived from the Ancient Greek word “to transfer”.
Related reading (or maybe we're including, because, maybe this happened to us): Why You Cried at the End of Coco.
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A data-driven look at the inherent sexism of jeans' pockets
The Pudding is fast becoming one of our favorite sites (and their domain is pudding.cool!). Their latest piece is an interactive, data-driven look at how the construction of women's jeans pockets is statistically problematic compared to those of men's:
Only 40 percent of women’s front pockets can completely fit one of the three leading smartphone brands. Less than half of women’s front pockets can fit a wallet specifically designed to fit in front pockets.
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We spend hundreds of collective hours reading, studying and creating newsletters. To see a gallery of our favorites, and what makes them so good, go to TheEdge.Email. Each week we'll recommend one of our favorites.
When it comes to A.I. we like to think of ourselves as 'well-versed' (especially in relation to content), but are not of the illusion we're a team of deep-learning PhDs.
For the more academic, serious end of the spectrum, we highly recommend Jack Clark's Import AI newsletter. Clark is the Comms Director for OpenAI, a nonprofit focused on the impact of AI on society, and more importantly, was a reporter at Bloomberg for a few years and can write. If you're looking to dip your toes into more Arxiv hyperlinks, this is the place to start.
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Exclamation Points and Corporate Anxiety
The Wall Street Journal hits on one of the most important subjects of our time. When should you use an exclamation point in professional life?
The article also references this classic Seinfeld clip on the proper usage of exclamation points:
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8 YOUR WEEKLY EDGE PARABLE
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Last week, we met the founder of a tool we love, Readwise. It helps aggregate, organize and deliver your Kindle Highlights (as well as other platforms like Instapaper) to help better retain information. If Twitter and Instagram are one end of the spectrum, with quick bursts of information instantly lost to the void, Readwise is the opposite end. It can surface knowledge from a book or article you read a decade ago.
We discussed the idea of an information retention spectrum, where certain mediums contribute very differently to how you build knowledge. We threw out the term “slow reading”, until we realized there already is a movement of people who already try to...read slowly. While we try to better visualize this spectrum for a future blog post, we view newsletters as a crucial middle. They are ephemeral, but can act as reference points. They are conversational, but carry the weight of professionalism. They are digestible, but convey knowledge worth retaining.
This morning's "Daily Readwise" email, which surfaces 5 past highlights, happened to pull this incredibly relevant gem from a 2014 WIRED piece (and for any news app nerds, note the Circa shoutout!):
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